Penny Junor: Prince William

Abroad, they were a sensation on every trip – in Australia, America, the Gulf States, Italy, Japan, the reception was rapturous. At home the combination was never more successful than as joint patrons of the Wishing Well Appeal for Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital. The target was £30 million in two years and in well under that time, they had helped raise £54 million with a further £30 million promised by the government.

No one saw what went on behind closed doors, and those that did, who knew that both Charles and Diana were seeing other people, never thought for a moment that this might imperil the marriage. Okay, it wasn’t happy, but it wasn’t the first aristocratic marriage to find a way of accommodating differences.

At that time, Charles had an office in St James’s Palace but he had no press office of his own and relied on the team at Buckingham Palace. Their concern was how to manage the runaway success of the royal couple. They felt the need to pace it; not to allow too much exposure, not to allow them to give too many interviews, not to let too much light in on the mystery of monarchy. They were well aware that members of the Royal Family were not like normal celebrities, whose popularity would wax and wane. They had to keep the popularity going for a very long time, maybe twenty or thirty years. Unlike politics or show business or any other career in which fame and popularity are a measure of success, the monarchy is a long-term game. There is no stepping out of public life when the going gets tough, no retreating into anonymity or even retiring at sixty. The work goes on remorselessly and the exposure with it, and as every celebrity knows, the greater the adulation, the faster it can disappear. The danger was if they had too much too quickly they wouldn’t be able to sustain it.

It is the dilemma that William’s team grapples with today.

William was eight when he started boarding school at Ludgrove, on 11 September 1990. Both parents were there to deliver him in a show of family unity, and the media were there in force to record it, but in reality they had come from different directions. Diana had driven William to Wokingham from London; Charles had travelled up from Gloucestershire. They rendezvoused down the road from the school, and drove the last mile or so together in the Prince’s Bentley. They were greeted by the headmasters, Gerald Barber and Nichol Marston, and Gerald’s wife, Janet.

Whatever their differences, they were united in their choice of school for William, and it couldn’t have been a more successful one. Ludgrove was as close to a home environment as a school could be. It was a small, family-run private preparatory school in the Berkshire countryside, set in 120 acres, with everything boys between the ages of eight and thirteen could possibly dream of. There has been a tradition of two headmasters working in tandem with their wives. Simon Barber and his wife Sophie and Sid and Olly Inglis are in post today and running it along much the same lines as Simon’s grandfather did when he moved the school from Cockfosters to the present site in 1937.

It was not a homely environment by accident. Their view is that home is the best place for a small boy to be, but every child has to be educated, so why not educate them in an atmosphere that feels as much like home as possible? As Simon Barber says, ‘Yes, some miss home but when they’re busy, all together, all doing the same thing, full boarding, they have such fun. And if they are homesick, there’s a massive support network from their own peer group and the adult population.’

William was homesick, like many children leaving the nest for the first time, and found it hard to settle. He was also anxious about the rows at home and the uncertainty, but there were mortal fears as well. His father had recently had a bad fall on the polo field and been rushed to hospital with his arm badly broken in several places. After a second long and complicated operation, Diana had taken William and his brother to visit him at the hospital. It was a shock to see his strong and dependable father in a hospital bed. His anxiety about his father aside, William was leaving the calm of the nursery and everything that was familiar to him, and leaving his mother too, while knowing of her unhappy state and just how much she would miss him. Every day she wrote loving notes to her ‘Darling Wombat’, which he kept safely locked inside his tuck box.

The Barbers were aware of the situation and while treating him no differently from the other boys in their care, they kept a particularly watchful eye. Janet is a naturally warm and affectionate woman and was like a mother to everyone; she referred to them as ‘my boys’ – and when she meets an old Ludgrovian today, of whatever age, she still thinks of him as one of hers. She had an encyclopaedic memory – as did her husband – and knew everything about each one of them. She was quick to notice if something was amiss or if a boy was unhappy; and if something was wrong, she quickly stepped in to sort things out or to support and help him through it, just as she would for her own son.

Boys come to the school at eight and for the next five years build friendships and support systems that last a lifetime. The Barbers liken the eight-year-olds to a collection of stones with edges that are thrown into a bag together. Their aim is to round off the edges so that by the time the boys move on to their next schools at thirteen, the stones all sit comfortably together. Empathy and tolerance are what they aim for, teaching the boys to get on with one another and to notice when someone is unwell or feeling down.

This nurturing environment is particularly valuable when home life is volatile. As Simon explains, ‘The continuity offers wonderful stability for the few from broken homes. They know where they are, they come back every Sunday with everybody else. They haven’t got the concern about what’s going on at home because they can immerse themselves in what’s going on here. It can be easier to be here than at home with all the anguish.’

It was, as one child remarked, ‘Like having a giant sleepover.’

There is certainly no shortage of fun things to do. The school has a nine-hole golf course, cricket pitches and practice nets, football pitches, squash courts, Eton fives courts, four tennis courts and a swimming pool. There is a music block, a sports hall, and the old milking parlour houses ceramics, art and carpentry. The pupils make camps and dens in the woods, and in the summer sleep out occasionally on the golf course and have sing-songs around the camp fire. For budding horticulturalists, there are little plots where each boy can grow his own flowers or vegetables. And to remind the boys that there is a world outside, newspapers are delivered daily and current affairs discussed every morning with a test every Saturday. There were many occasions during those years when the Barbers had to pretend the papers hadn’t been delivered – they didn’t want William to see the stories of Charles and Diana’s failing marriage that filled the front pages.

One memorable story involved William himself. A group of boys had been playing around on the putting green when one of them swung his club and accidentally hit William on the head. He was briefly concussed and, according to one of the boys, he fell to the ground with blood pouring from a gash in his head. His detective went into a spin. The last bit of the story is certainly true. The school nurse carried William to the main building and planned to take him to the sanatorium and send for the doctor. His PPO stepped in and insisted that an ambulance be called, which it duly was, and William was taken to the local Accident and Emergency Department at the Royal Berkshire Hospital in Reading. Diana was having lunch at San Lorenzo, one of her favourite restaurants in London, when she heard the news; Charles was at Highgrove and said of that moment, ‘My heart went cold.’ Both of them dashed down the motorway to meet at the hospital. By the time they arrived, William was sitting up in bed looking one hundred per cent. ‘He was chatting away,’ said Charles. ‘Then I knew he was going to be all right.’